Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11
theverge.com
theverge.com
Want to highlight one paragraph from that description: "Intel Bridge Technology is run-time post compiler that can be integrated into Android-in-Container to enable certain Android apps – those not written in Java or compiled to run natively on Intel-based devices - to run on those devices."
How many Android apps out there are not written in Java? I'm guessing Kotlin isn't supported either. For that matter how many apps are targeting Android devices with Intel CPUs anymore?
I was expecting a full VM / emulator, but this doesn't sound like that.
The difficulty is for native code, the arm libraries embedded in many apps. Actually most Android app depends on native libs. For image processing for example. Nearly all games are using native arm binaries.
The sentence you quoted is probably related to native code only, which is the difficult part. It looks like they have some magic tricks to make them work on x86 architecture with having to recompile the libs.
Intel used the same tricks in their x86 android devices a few years ago, you could run arm native code on their x86 android versions transparently.
[1] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/dex-format
no, there's a new NT subsystem to support this: Windows Subsystem for Android, and as you could guess from the name, it is somewhat related to WSL.
the NT kernel was always designed to accommodate multiple subsystems running at once. Until WSL, there was only ever the Windows subsystem itself. soon there will be a third subsystem one can install.
this is neat, to me.
WSL1 is the "Linux as a subsystem of Windows" thing I described.
Note that WSL2 is not a complete upgrade from WSL1, and WSL2 does not render WSL1 obsolete. They each have strengths that the other does not.
And interestingly enough, Android support was the original purpose of WSL. It was modified to run an Ubuntu user land on original release for some Microsoft product reason. It's nice to see it coming back in it's original form too.
There is amazing depth inside parts of Microsoft. For example, a team built Xbox360-on-PC sometime around 2007-08. That was emulating the PowerPC and GPU on Intel PCs. This didn't ship for various reasons as a product, but it was in the draw when Xbox One came along and they wanted game compatibility between Xbox 360 and XBox One.
WSLv1 was built on Drawbridge that originally came from MSR. I heard a rumor that WSL was spun out from a project using Drawbridge to run Android. Obviously a lot of work went into WSL subsequently, but the pieces to get started were in place.
Lot of apps use natively compiled libraries through NDK.
“Clubhouse for Android” category: avant- grade apps that launch first on Android or define android platform. Nonexistent.
“Median phone user ecosystem:” The TikTok Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat, China app ecosystem and India app ecosystem. The experience of all these is bad on Windows browsers or unavailable.
”Games”: hard to say, because Windows is a better platform for games than Android by 10x.
This doesn’t sound very strategy driven. If it’s UX driven, hard to see how it competes with the median user getting an iPhone. This is the case with the consumer in China, where despite 30 Android app stores and lots of innovation / competition the iPhone is still preferred by those who can afford it.
Note that there are quite a few commercial "Android on PC" emulators already, e.g. https://www.memuplay.com/, https://www.bluestacks.com/ and https://www.bignox.com/.
In terms of scale, Bluestacks claim they have 50 million monthly active users which makes them pretty substantial! From https://www.bluestacks.com/promote-your-game.html. Overall mobile gaming revenue is now larger than console gaming and more than 2x PC gaming, and rapidly growing (https://scaletech.medium.com/mobile-gaming-statistics-trends...). Android gaming is a much bigger market than you'd imagine, especially for the younger generation.
> hard to see how it competes with the median user getting an iPhone
> This is the case with the consumer in China, where ... the iPhone is still preferred by those who can afford it
I think you're seriously overestimating how popular iPhones are, even to users who can afford them. Especially if you're looking at Windows users, Android is hugely dominant outside the US.
In China for example, iOS market share is actually constant around 20% or maybe slightly declining over the last decade (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262176/market-share-held...) despite the huge increase in average purchasing power, which makes it seem unlikely that the only thing holding people in China back from them is the price.
Globally, Android is at 70% of devices (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide) even in relatively wealth areas like the EU. iOS is primarily popular in the USA (where it's about 60% of devices). I suspect iOS and Mac usage are fairly closely correlated, so the Android percentage goes up substantially if you're only looking at Windows users. I think Android integration actually makes a lot of sense for Microsoft!
It subjects me to ads for third-rate games that I can't imagine people play. First-tier Android games like F/GO and Genshin Impact seem to be disabled on non-phone devices, particularly Bluestacks and Android TV. I see a huge amount of fan art from those games, but I wonder if gaming on Bluestacks is just a Potemkin Village.
So a user count comparable to 100%+ of the US phone user population?
It is not a small market, there's (I assume) a good correlation with Windows users, and it's not a bad idea for Microsoft to be looking at potential integrations here.
I think a possible advantage is also integration with Teams and OneDrive. Aandroid apps don't tend to use file stored in directory structures. You use the share menu instead and maybe some pickers for photos and downloads. This could integrate well into their cloud ecosystem. Save app data to OneDrive and have sharing menus work between the two. You could even have tabs in teams that show an Android app and store the data in the team. Corporate IT departments might prefer that to voluminous directory structures and vendor management.
Natively supporting an Android app store allows them to get apps so users will want to buy the hardware, which in turn generates market share that gets developers interested.
Around here when people aren't carrying an iPad, they are most certainly carrying either a Surface or a foldable Windows laptop.
A fair few games are developed in C++ and run through the Android native interface. Unity games, often written in C#, run on Unity's native runtime which has been ported to Android.
Intel Bridge Technology is, presumably, a way to get ARM binaries running on x86 by AOT compiling them. It is not necessary for Java or Kotlin apps or native x86 apps, so those will run without IBT.
> According to Intel, Bridge itself is a run-time post compiler that translates applications that are compiled for non-x86 platforms (in this case, Android applications) into x86 instructions (which can run on Windows 11 with Intel or AMD CPUs).
Pretty much none, but I expect most devs are developing/testing on x86 Android emulators, since they're developing on x86 systems.
I think they mean non-x86 binaries e.g. ARM, Would still be interesting to see how the translation happens it's not like MS/Intel has silicon level advantage like Rosetta/M1 but for translating other way around.
>I was expecting a full VM / emulator, but this doesn't sound like that.
Even Google did not consider VM/emulator, The went for Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) and then after learning that it doesn't support all features they switched to containers.
I am waiting for that time. Windows 10 is "phony" already and becoming more like it's built for people with low vision. I hate it's UI. I hope bringing android in windows don't turn into another Electron.
> Some years later everyone will realize that desktops are not phones and are meant to utilize more available screen space.
Keep in mind there's plenty of android apps designed to function on tablets with much larger screens. Obviously there's not nearly as many as on the iOS side of the world where the iPad is far more successful, and there's a wide variability in how good they are at taking advantage of the extra real estate. But they're out there.
The real issue, IMO, is that those apps are designed with a touch-based UX, and that doesn't translate well to mouse-based interaction. And one of the few areas where Apple and I are in agreement is in poor ergonomics of a touchscreen on a laptop or PC.
And now days every desktop app is made as if "mouse" doesn't exist. Or as if `market research has shown that bigger buttons engage more users`. I like to see more on my screen in one go.
That's why we get multiple monitors or bigger monitors. To see more content.
And everyone is hellbent on wasting it. More CPU/RAM got us more web-as-desktop apps. Higher resolution, bigger screens are giving us bigger, emptier GUIs.
Can't wait for the Android Settings integration to Control Panel next...
That said, I can't say how it feels at work.
The screenshot at the top of TFA specifically shows this.
Sure the ecosystem is far from being mature, but it is also progressively benefiting from chromebook integration, and hopefully from this windows integration.
And that's good for us because, should the Amazon App Store become more viable for manufacturers, Google might find themselves increasingly losing control of Android, and increasingly forced to make the Play Store more competitive.
Maybe another big company will pick it up, but if not, I don't see much benefit to the hobbyist community over the current status quo if Android gets "opened up" more but also loses 99+% of total corporate backing toward its development. Even if Amazon or MS run with it (and maybe that's what this is the beginning of?) that seems more like an on-life-support scenario than one with a bright future for Android.
Could go totally differently if major phone and tablet manufacturers ignore the New Shiny Thing and stick with Android so developing commercial software for it remains viable, I guess.
Their new wearables partnership with Samsung may help here. Maybe Samsung would play along with a new Fuchsia phone OS. But there's still the developer issue; any new OS like this would need Android-backward compatibility support exactly similar to what Microsoft is doing here. "Android" in this sense doesn't mean "the OS"; its the application system.
What's happening in the Android world right now is so healthy and excellent, I almost can't believe its the product of Big Tech. Google is already pushing Android apps on ChromeOS, now Microsoft has them on Windows, through the Amazon app store, and nowhere in any of this is the actual Android Operating System. The comparison here isn't Android vs iOS vs Windows; its Android vs Flutter vs Web. Its a new way of writing "native"-adjacent multiplatform applications; the OS doesn't matter anymore.
Sure the touch-friendly UI will suck in some applications, on some deployments of Windows. That's not Android's fault; its on the developer to recognize the input method and canvas size, and adjust accordingly. I hope more do!
Possibly the app ecosystem will survive, even if the OS itself withers into obscurity, provided Fuscia can run Android apps (seems likely, but I haven't kept up with news on that sort of thing)
It could amount to little, of course. Even iOS apps on MacOS as a concept and practice has not remotely the luster ardent Apple acolytes predicted, certainly not yet even 7 months in.
All the "cool" new Google features and performance upgrades may be Fuchsia only. I wouldn't bank much on Amazon. They just need an OS to run their readily disposable devices. I don't see them putting too much effort into this.
Google is going the hold the hand of manufacturers and ease them into it.
At least if Google had any sense this is how it would be done.
If only someone had thought about that before: a language targeting a bytecode interpreter and an ecosystem of library sitting on top of the operating system in order to be able to run programs on any operating system. In a way we could call it a virtual machine as it makes the OS insignificant. Written like this it sounds like 1994 tech. A shame we had to wait so long...
There are people who complain about how the industry is moving in cycles and how what's old is new again and how functional languages did that back in 1922. These people don't change the world; they just complain about how other people are changing it.
Just because it is bytecode it doesn't mean it is interpreted.
> Unlike some other virtual-machine architectures in which the virtual instructions are interpreted at run time, TIMI instructions are never interpreted. They constitute an intermediate compile time step and are translated into the processor's instruction set as the final compilation step. The TIMI instructions are stored within the final program object, in addition to the executable machine instructions. This is how application objects compiled on one processor family (e.g., the original CISC AS/400 48-bit processors) could be moved to a new processor (e.g., PowerPC 64-bit) without re-compilation. An application saved from the older 48-bit platform can simply be restored onto the new 64-bit platform where the operating system discards the old machine instructions and re-translates the TIMI instructions into 64-bit instructions for the new processor.
The most recent phone that shipped with Tizen had a 480 x 800 pixel display.
And then there was this Pascal VM available across all 16 bit home computers, starting at the UCSD.
They aren't just going to turf Android.
Has the iOS apps on M1 Macs incentivised developers to do anything, apart from just opt out of the program?
For MS I think this could be a modest low risk win, even if it doesn’t massively take off. It gets them at least some tablet apps, and some popular social apps for desktop, without having to incentive developers to port them.
Microsoft gets Android Apps, Amazon expands its app store and Google is shunted out of the Microsoft eco-system.
I see this as an absolute brilliant thing to happen to the app ecosystem.
I really hope innovation accelerates on the Amazon App store.
Seems like all the major OS are betting that mobile is going to be the focus of future native app development and don't want desktop users to miss out.
No one can match the level of integration Apple had made on Windows and Android platform.
We'll see what kind of limitations and bugs to show up.
Same as Microsoft copying Chrome and calling it Edge, users have another browser, now with MS telemetry etc. instead of Google. Good for user choice but hardly innovation.
(I don't really follow how your comment related to the issue.)
We'll see about this one. Last I checked, half of Microsoft's own apps couldn't run on Android if Play Services was disabled.
And it's very likely Google will find ways to retaliate against Microsoft for working with the Amazon Appstore here. They are pretty aggressive against forks. Honestly, I would suspect the next Duo won't be able to run Play Services, because Microsoft dared to work with a competing Android app store.
Just speculating - I know nothing about Android support at Microsoft.
iOS is 54.33% of all tablets, Android is 45.57%. Microsoft, Amazon, and everyone else combined account for 0.1%
It doesn't seem like an ecosystem Google has the time to worry about.
You can already run Linux on Windows. Now you can run Android. No need to mess around with Archon, Nox, Genymotion anymore. Got a weather app you like? An audiobook player? Done.
Hopefully this means more interoperability with Microsoft’s own Android apps, so buying a phone like the Surface Duo and using the Your Phone feature actually does something.
This definitely lowers the barrier to entry, thought I have little faith in how Microsoft will present it. Been burned too many times by them on poor UX/DX (WSL, F#)
I’d love to compare those side by side to make a judgement of which looks more janky.
I’m excited to see that Apple is unifying their hardware architectures across their various form factors of computing devices.
That’ll be interesting in the future.
So xbox, (phones?), tablets, laptops, desktops, servers ran the same Windows essentially with different shells.
Windows also supports multiple hardware architectures - we just need the external ecosystem to thrive as well. We see it in graphics with nvidia and amd but compute/cpu progress limped through most of 2012-2018?.
Windows for ARM is still in preview, I believe.
Surface Pro X running on ARM was released to public 2 years ago. We had x86onARM translation since 2018 I believe.
They partnered with Amazon. Google probably wasn’t helpful in integrating the play store.
I have been thinking what's really keeping the "new" Microsoft outside the smartphone game?
Google creating a desktop OS market share is not really on the horizon. But if Microsoft takes the right steps it might venture out to smartphones again, and gain market share this time. The HN crowd may not be the best audience for unified experience that Apple seems to be heading toward but there is sure demand for it in the mainstream.
https://developer.amazon.com/docs/adm/overview.html
Gotify and OpenPush are open source push notification solutions, both in the beginning stages of development:
- Gotify: https://gotify.net/
- OpenPush: https://bubu1.eu/openpush/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-mo...
>> For ages now, every annual report on desktop operating system market share has had the same top two contenders: Microsoft's Windows in a commanding lead at number one and Apple's macOS in distant second place. But in 2020, Chrome OS became the second-most popular OS, and Apple fell to third.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chromebook-units-surge-275-in-...
>> Chromebook units surge 275% in Q1
Oh, ok.
The best chromebooks have a 64GB SSD for the price of a full Windows laptop.
Maybe they want to steal google's OS
Blackberry tried it with Blackberry 10 and failed. IBM failed the same way with OS/2. If you make your OS compatible with a foreign platform, there is less incentive to write original software for it and, therefore, there is less reason to get your platform instead of the one you are compatible with.
And as an Android dev, I now have an incentive to optimize for Microsoft device form factors, which is a lot easier to do and maintain than making a whole port
And I don't see that there are too many developers who are now writing Windows desktop apps who will suddenly decide to rewrite for Android. Cos what apps are native? Stuff like CAD software, Unity, Photoshop, etc - stuff that has heavy complex UIs and wouldn't work well if at all in most Android contexts
That's the point. Over time, the volume of Windows-specific software should decrease because when you write for Android, you effectively target both platforms.
> who will suddenly decide to rewrite for Android.
That will be the case for a while, until there are Android devices with capabilities similar to a Windows computer. Apple neatly solved that with the M1-based iPads, as they are effectively more powerful than most Windows devices.
They don't want you to go to another platform for anything.
But this was highlighted in the video clearly targeted at consumers with great fanfare, so I don't know...
I might also want to run wechat there, though that could run into a variety of issues.
They used to offer a way to use it in the browser, too, but that's been shut down.
Maybe you present a minority of the user base and this is not targeted to you. So, yes.
The main reason to want these apps on windows are mechanical keyboards, mice, and file processing (think loading files from your pc). In my experience, 5% of all users want this (relevant) and quite badly, in fact
WhatsApp or whatever other messaging apps. Banking apps. Pocket. Actually decent ebook reader. Actually decent podcast app.
However, weirdly enough, VPN Android apps work just fine at a system level on Chromebooks. Go figure...
This is still better than having to use an emulator or not being able to use the app at all.
The fact that this partnership is with the Amazon app store, not the Google Play store, is a strong hint of how serious they are about this, and how this latest iteration will work out.
Popular apps can be used via the web-browser or even have a separat desktop app (e.g., whatsapp, facebook, youtube, ...). That is similar with games.
Edit: apps which require sensors, such as gps, gyro, etc. wouldn't work anyway...
There’s been a few attempts at containerised android apps on Linux too - Anbox and some others. Looks like that one runs on the Pine phone now too. Makes more sense for touch/smaller form factor, not so much for desktop (except maybe for some popular mobile only apps like TikTok)
Sounds like a disaster to me.
I would bet, for better or for worse, these Amazon Android apps will share metadata as well, so you'll see the same "Star" rating in both the Microsoft App Store and the Amazon Android App Store, but that's speculation on my part.
But if everyone can run Snapchat on Windows, that kinda changes the whole game, unless they support the same APIs. But even then, it seems like it would be trivial to block that API.
This will make anyone able to do it.
They shouldn't, but they do it anyway because virtually no users know how to "cheat", and most don't even know that they can cheat. The justification is that taking a screenshot violates your or someone else's privacy or security. In the case of security, they assume you're too dumb to know better.
Most of the time it's the other way around.
Instagram where I can upload photos on the desktop and tweak them.
Could use my banking app with Windows Hello for authentication.
In other words, the cases where the Android App has more features than the web site version.
That would be twice the playerbase of Candy Crush for a fairly niche software.
I get why this is potentially useful but I can't think a single app I'd actually use this way.
They decided not to ship either one, although I don't think I ever saw an official reason.
The app ecosystem was a small part of the failure of Windows Mobile, IMHO. A larger issue was that they abandoned the low end in WM10, and that's where they were doing well in WP7 and 8. That each major version of the OS also had a new app framework was a lot of work for app developers, too. And blocking 3rd party browsers (mostly) and then making WM10 use Edge which was somehow worse than Mobile IE, when a browser is key on a platform without a lot of native apps didn't help.
I really hope there will still be a way to sideload the Google Play Store. It is one of the first things I do on Amazon devices.
edit: the more i think about it the more it makes sense – multiple hardware vendors of the handsets themselves, then multiple software vendors of the the apps themselves. Would surely spur competitiveness and innovation when it comes to app pricing/bundling/sales/…
This sounds like it's integrating with Amazon's app store directly so unless there's some way of sideloading Android apps using the underlying bridge to run them, Play Store purchases would not be available on Windows.
Microsoft really killing it since Nadella took over
On the other hand metro does not feel right on a big screen anyway, maybe it fits well?
just what I've always wanted
well at least now I'll be able to play Diablo Immortal....
I absolutely don't want to run the crapware on my phone on a real computer.
That was rather promising, but IIRC it got to some legal problems.
I was in beta (or alpha, do not remember) test group.
It uses Intel Bridge, which is a JIT compiler like Rosetta. So, they seem to have done it for ARM64.
edit: base=kernel
Intel even made an attempt into the smartphone CPU market with the Asus ZenFone 4 back in 2014 with an Intel Atom x86 processor running Android. Modern Pixelbooks (and other x86 Chromebooks) run Android apps fine too, and those are technically Linux, so therefore it's already been done. Anbox also seems to do it fine in a container. Never tried that though.
my question was, why cant we use manjaro or ubuntu, double click on an apk and run it like an appimage? i am asking from the POV of an end user. I dont understand bytecode or ndk. if windows 11 can freely run an android app like it was a .exe, why cant my linux machine do that? anbox aside.